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Female Friend Vacancy

I was pretty freaked out about that thing yesterday. But the sad thing was, I couldn’t talk about it with anyone who would understand what I needed.

For instance, over breakfast this morning, I regaled my mother with this story. In my acute embarrassment, I was grinning the whole time. The whole story was prefaced, punctuated, and finished with pleas for her not to freak out. Credit to her, she didn’t. But she did want to unpack the whole thing, and discover ways to “avoid this happening in the future”.

Which is.. great. But like I described in the post before, not something that I control at all. Could’ve happened in any public place. A discussion about this ensued, where debates about relative safety, and such and such followed.

Right.

Next, I tried pinging my BFF. He is a guy, about 8 years younger, and we work together on projects. He isn’t exactly mature, obviously, but has a heart of solid gold. He also calls me ‘mom’ on occasion, which is partially why I debated talking to him about this at all.

Which, to be fair to me, I was justified in feeling.

End of conversation.

At least I tried to tell him that I wanted to vanish into a puff of smoke. With my mum, I did talk about wanting to look unobtrusive, but we reached that point after a lot of back and forth.

The point is that neither of these people who I care a lot about, and who care about me, were able to understand that I needed to unpack my feelings about the incident. I just needed them to listen, without giving me solutions or telling me how I was being ridiculous.

The fact is I AM probably being ridiculous. I just need to talk it out of my system. Previously, this role of confidant and chief listener was fulfilled by the ex. Since then, I have found various outlets for the same sort of thing, but somehow I don’t feel completely better.

Oh, I started to tell Butterfly Dude about stuff like this, usually spinning it into a funny story. But now I feel too self-conscious to continue because I don’t want to regale a guy I may be interested in with stories about how I am constantly bombarded with unwanted male attention.

Therefore, I have come to the conclusion I need female friends. I tweeted about it too, and 3 people actually responded. Fingers crossed.